Fifty Minute Midwinter Mix

A mix for the winter solstice, the longest night and shortest day, and to celebrate the fact that we'll start to get a little more daylight every day. Songs with winter in the title are plentiful and there are quite a few that didn't make it into this mix for various reasons- I wanted to keep this mix largely ambient/ ambient inspired (although that goes a bit off piste in places as you can see from the tracklisting below). Aztec Camera's Walk Out To Winter, The Bangles/ Simon and Garfunkel's Hazy Shade Of Winter and Teenage Fanclub's Winter just didn't fit and A Certain Ratio's ten minute drone epic Winter Hill was too long and cutting it down/ fading it out didn't seem right. 

Fifty Minute Midwinter Mix

• Joanna Brouk: Winter Chimes
• Pye Corner Audio: A Winter Drone For Christmas
• SUSS: Winter Light
• The Durutti Column: Sketch For Winter
• Trentemoller: While The Cold Winter Waiting
• Michael Head And The Red Elastic Band: Winter Turns To Spring
• Stockholm Monsters: Winter
• The Pictish Trail: Winter Home Disco
• Saint Etienne: Her Winter Coat
• Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Winterlong
• Vashti Bunyan: Winter Is Blue
• Glass Candy: Warm In The Winter

Winter Chimes is from a 1980 Joanna Brouk album, The Space Between. It is atmospheric and enchanting, just chimes and piano sitting somewhere in the space where ambient crosses into New Age.

Pye Corner Audio's Winter Drone For Christmas- the title is exactly what it is- is from Christmas Eve 2023, five minutes of low key synth loveliness. 

Winter Light is from Promise, the 2020 album by SUSS, an ambient Americana trio from New York. Highly recommended.  

Sketch For Winter is from The Durutti Column's 1980 album, The Return Of The Durutti Column album, Vini Reilly's debut long player. Vini was pushed into Cargo Studios in Rochdale by Tony Wilson during a period when he was suffering from severe depression. Tony thought it might save Vini. In the studio was Martin Hannett and a van load of new equipment. The album, Fact 14, was housed in a Situationist inspired sandpaper sleeve, and contains ten tracks of Vini playing guitar and Martin playing 'switches' (as the sleevenotes say). It's recently been remastered and re- issued and sounds better than ever, a foundational album for Factory and UK post- punk (not that it sounds post- punk but it is- Vini says, doing what he did could only have happened in the space that opened up after punk). 

Trentemoller's 2006 album The Last Resort was the Danish producer's debut, an electronic album that sounds very live.

Michael Head and The Red Elastic Band's Adios Senor Pussycat still sounds like one of the best albums of 2017 and of that entire decade. Winter Turns To Spring is Mick on piano and singing, a change of sound from the rich, full band scouse folk rock that makes up most of the album. 

Stockholm Monsters were from Burnage and signed to Factory. Winter is from 1984's Alma Mater, a record produced by Peter Hook and largely ignored in 1984, one of those albums that is a lost gem. A dark, monochrome sound, led by the bass guitar, very poetic and very Factory. 

The Pictish Trail is Johnny Lynch, who operates out of a caravan on the Isle Of Eigg, Scotland and was part of the Fence Collective and the man behind Fence Records, an open minded, folk influenced label started by Lynch and King Creosote. Winter Home Disco kicks in with a drum machine but the folk and psyche follow quickly. A rather beautiful song from 2008 which all of a sudden seems a long time ago. 

Her Winter Coat was a 2021 single by Saint Etienne, Pete Wiggs creating a Christmas sounding song without going full Xmas cheese. Icy and quietly epic.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Winterlong came out on Decade,a  triple lp compilation from 1977 that was only the start of Neil's career long trawl through his unreleased vaults and shelved projects. Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I heard the Pixies cover of Winterlong, released on a 1989 tribute album called The Bridge, before I heard Neil's. Neil and Crazy Horse recorded Winterlong in 1973 at Neil's Broken Arrow Ranch. It is perfect in the way only Neil and Crazy Horse can sound- slightly frazzled, slightly out of tune, ragged and dreamy and psychedelic, searching for something- love, fulfillment- before concluding, 'it's all an illusion anyway'. 

Vashti Bunyan's Winter Is Blue is lyrically dark- winter and loss of love, life having no meaning. The guitars and arrangement are deceptively jaunty, a trick folk music often pulls. This is the Immediate version, recorded it for Andrew Loog Oldham's label in 1967 and unreleased until 2007. Vashti re- recorded it for her 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day, a record so poorly received that she packed it all in and went to Scotland by horse and cart and then to Ireland for several decades before its rediscovery in the 21st century. 

Warm In The Winter is a joy- Glass Candy released it as a single on Italians Do It Better in 2013. Giddy synth pop, a song in love with life and with itself, 'Crazy like a monkey/ Happy like a new year'. Partway through Ida sings, 'You're beautiful. You came from heaven. We love you!' and the synth arpeggios build, and the song skips and swoops, and the darkness gets pushed out and, once again, winter passes. Happy solstice. 

Sunny On The Inside

Friday has arrived, once again like it always does, but it feels like it's worth celebrating. I finish work for two weeks today, some much needed time away from it. There are so many things going on there at the moment that it's impossible to know where to begin. The shift from teaching online to teaching back in the classroom, with the mass testing of over a thousand teenagers and then re- integrating them back into classrooms and routines, plus all the ongoing discussions about how grades are going to be awarded, has been hard work. It's clear that for many of them extended periods in lockdown and time out of social situations has had a big impact. Some time away from everything is what everyone needs. 

I came off my bike last weekend. Cycling along a country lane near Tatton Park I hit a pothole and was on the tarmac before I had time to do anything about it. The right hand side of my body hit the ground, knee first, then hip, shoulder and ankle. Apologies if you're not good with blood but this is what my knee looked like when I got home. 

Luckily my bike was fine- I cunningly cushioned it with my body- so I was able to cycle home, blood dripping down my leg. When I cleaned it up it wouldn't stop bleeding so I went to A and E and was treated, grit washed out of the wound, X- rays done as a precaution and steri- strips applied to close the wound (the nurse said that she couldn't stitch it as the wound was too jagged and I'd left too much of the skin somewhere on the road in Cheshire). I have been hobbling round all week as a result. Several people have pointed out that they told me that exercise is dangerous and one family member asked me if I should be doing these things at my age. 

So that's the status updates from my life. The clocks go forward this weekend and there has been the occasional bit of blue sky. The sun came out once or twice. From Monday we're allowed to have people in our gardens. Maybe things are looking up (I'm aware that as I type these words the words 'third wave' are becoming a media currency). Ten years ago Glass Candy, an Oregon duo made up of Johnny Jewel and Ida No, released their Italo- disco single Warm In The Winer, a giddy, ecstatic, endorphin rush of a record. Over some euphoric, Moroder- esque arpeggiated synthlines singer Ida coos about 'love in the air' and being 'sunny on the inside/ Crazy like a monkey (ee ee ooh ooh!!)/ Happy like a new year'. A more uplifting and life affirming song you will not hear today. 

Warm In The Winter

Digital Versicolor

This is a free download of Glass Candy's Digital Versicolor by New York's Black Light Smoke. I'm a big fan of Ida No and Johnny Jewel's uptempo house/Italo disco, especially 2011's massive, giddy, grin inducing Warm In The Winter. This one here is Moroder-esque and has a throbbing sequencer line aimed squarely at your dancefloor.

Rise

Here's some super slinky 70s stuff from Glass Candy, a cover of Herb Alpert's classic. Glass Candy always manage to stay just the right side of the line- they skirt it pretty close sometimes- but make no mistake, this is class. Listening to this I feel like I should be reclining in my 25th floor New York apartment overlooking Central Park, in one of those suspended plastic bowl seats, with a large weighty tumbler in my hand (spirits splashed over ice), while my girlfriend lounges in a see-through nightie idly flicking through Cosmopolitan. I am wearing polyester flares and a polo-neck, smoking. A chimp plays the trumpet.

Mix

I did a mix for a new website called Cooking Up A Quiet Storm. There are a whole bunch of top notch mixes there, some by people familiar to these pages and the blogs over on the right hand side of your computer screen. If you like mine, or anyone else's, there are two things you could do- leave a comment there, and maybe also volunteer to do a mix yourself. I'm sure Mark would appreciate it.

My mix looks like this...

My Bloody Valentine - Don't Ask Why/Warpaint - Love Is To Die/Public Service Broadcasting - Everest/Big Audio Dynamite - V Thirteen/Toy - Dead and Gone (Andrew Weatherall Remix)/Brian Eno - Another Green World (The Blue Realm mix)/The Orb v Lisa Stansfield - Time To Make You Mine/The Asphodells - Beglammered/Kolsh- Der Alte/Glass Candy - Warm In The Winter

Redheads Feel More Pain

Gentlemen prefer blondes I know, but do redheads feel more pain? Answers on a postcard please.

My favourite nu-discoists Glass Candy put a new song up on Youtube, which is what often counts as a release now. It went up on August 5th, while we were on holiday, and was also our 18th wedding anniversary. Mrs Swiss and I had a romantic meal for four at the campsite restaurant. The song's a slow burner, not up there with Warm In The Winter but very good all the same. I seem to be hammering this kind of summery, spacey, housey-disco, kind of thing at the moment. What happened to the guitars?

Warm In The Winter

Possessed

New single from my current nu-disco favouites Glass Candy here- free download (thanks to London Lee for the tip off, hope he doesn't mind me re-presenting it here. Think of it as a kind of Bank Holiday Special on repeat). It's a slow burning affair with bubbling synths and Ida No's druggy vox, through the glass darkly. Which reminds me- I still need to find a copy of Warm In The Winter on vinyl.

Edit: have now purchased said vinyl, and am awaiting it's arrival. While I'm here again here's the video

Beatific

Some more Vorticist linocuts for you- words I didn't think I'd end up typing when I started this blog. The one above is Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's The Wrestlers (looks like it should be easy to do, probably very difficult. Maybe I should try).

Second, E McKnight Kauffer's Flight- he went on to advertising and to produce posters for the London Underground.

Third, Claude Flight's Revolution- fucking brilliant (and yes, that's art criticism).

Finally Lill Tschudi's Tour De Suisse, which isn't really done justice to in this jpeg.

Today's music- some more slightly barking nu-disco from my current faves Glass Candy; good enough to melt the snow and bring the sun out.

Beatific

Kill For Love

I bought an album on a whim last weekend, based on it being recommended by someone and in Piccadilly Records top ten lps of 2012- Chromatics' album Kill For Love. On double pink vinyl. Also I'd heard their cover version of New Order's Ceremony which I thought was alright (with Glass Candy's Ida No on guitar and Johnny Jewel, it turns out, is a member of both bands).



Some of the songs are growing on me, individually, although as a whole album I think it's too long and samey, too one paced. But maybe that's me and my lessening patience for 16 song albums. There's an early 80s mix of clean guitarlines, crisp production and electronics and a lot of icy atmosphere. At times the FX on the vocals are really irritating- singer Adam Miller making way too much use of his vocoder- but when Ruth Radelet sings things take off. The title track features Ruth's vocals and the unmistakeable influence of Bernard, Hooky, Steven and Gillian.

Kill For Love

Warm In The Winter

'Warm in the winter, sunny on the inside'

This, as people on Twitter are irritatingly prone to saying, is my new jam...



From Oregon, Glass Candy are a duo/trio, who make disco. It's slightly warped and slightly trippy, with analogue synth arpeggios, some big bass keys, and great loopy, uplifting vocals, but it's disco all the same. Weatherall played it at the end of his recent 6 Mix show if you need a further recommendation. It is great. It is, as I said, my new jam.

I'm off looking for more of their stuff. Apparently much of it is vinyl only and sold at gigs. Not much chance then.